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| The group at Roblar, our first stop |
On May 21st, the Westside Wine Club headed up north to Santa Barbara wine country for a day of winetasting. To be safe and maximize the fun, we hired a private shuttle to take the 11 of us around. Our first stop was Roblar Wineries, which had a large, beautiful tasting room and lovely grounds and was the perfect start to our trip. Next we headed to Rusack in Ballard Canyon, where we had a private tasting on the patio under the trees where we also had a leisurely picnic lunch. The grounds are beautiful, large shady trees surrounded by acres of vineyards and rolling hills in the background. We spent quite awhile relaxing at Rusack and then headed to our next appointment at Buttonwood Farms. The wonderful Graham gave us a tour of the vineyards, fermentation and barrel rooms, bottling facilities and even got to barrel taste a white wine. It was interesting, educational and fun, all at the same time. Finally we ended the day in Los Olivos, where we went to a couple of tasting rooms including the Cupcake tasting (which everyone really enjoyed, pairing wines with cupcakes), Longoria Wines and Tensley Wines. After a lovely day with lots of wine, we headed back to our rented house in Mesa, Santa Barbara and hung out for the night, ordering pizza and catching up. The next morning one of the cars headed back early while the other car went shopping in downtown Santa Barbara on State Street and had a lunch at the Super-rica Taqueria. A fabulous girls weekend with great friends...can't wait for next year!
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| Riding in style (and safety) in our shuttle. Definitely the way to do winetasting. |
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| Rusack |
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| Fermentation tanks at Buttonwood |
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| Barrel tasting (I think it was a Rousanne) |
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| Karina checking out baby grapes |
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| Baby grape cluster, so cute! |
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| Karina learning to throw up "westside" hand signals |
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| Almost getting the hang of it, just backwards |
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| The quaint town of Los Olivos. Where most people are probably a little tipsy all the time |
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| Happy belated birthday Jen! |
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| Shopping on State Street in downtown Santa Barbara |
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| The famous La Super-Rica in Santa Barbara. Yes we did wait an hour but it was delicious! |
